


Our Ever Growing Pod

by Glassworkclock



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fantasy AU, M/M, Multi, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Polyamory, kelpieBucky, merSteve, selkiePeggy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 23:02:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3358559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glassworkclock/pseuds/Glassworkclock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pod stays together. Even if that means experiments and war. Pod always stays together</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Steve

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! A few heads up. 1) I'm dyslexic disgraphic. Yelling in all caps and saying mean things dose not majicly cure my typos. I have a few editors that I can sometimes snag and edit this myself the best I can. Thanks~
> 
> 2) You may already know of the lovely mersteve work by chaya! If not look them up and read it. It's wonderful and your life will be better for showering them in love. I had the idea for a non human steve a while ago, many different non human steves (more will come). So thou they are lovely, I'm not trying to copy them.

Peggy was the first like him he’d seen since agreeing to the experiment. She smelled like the sea. She smelled like half his home. She just didn’t smell of the boy at the docks that had taken him into his pod. Who had stumbled over his name until letting out a laugh and asking if ‘Steve was close enough’. But she smelled and felt like pod.  
  
When the day was done, and his feet ached from the marching and running, they would slip down to the lake together. Peggy would slip her seal pelt up over her freckled shoulders and Steve would relax and let his red, white, and blue speckled scales come back out. They would stay in the water, wiggling their not toes as Steve brushed Peggy’s fur and wove her a crown of flowers, and Peggy would rub against him in a silent promise to braid his hair when she had fingers again.  
  
Drill Sergeant still didn’t like that Steve refused to have his hair cut and that his status as the potential super soldier allowed it. Steve liked the feeling of Peggy twisting it up into a bun every morning. It made up for the lack of webbing between his fingers. And it almost made of for the fact that Drill Sergeant couldn’t see his fins stand up in an angry challenge in his ‘human looking’ shape. Even as small as he was Drill Sargent would have at least stepped back.  
“There will be lakes and rivers over there too right?” Steve asked for the hundredth time that night  
  
Peggy nodded watching as Steve paced in the little lake, fins twitchy. “It’s okay to be nervous about tomorrow.”  
  
Steve pulled a face. “I’m not nervous. It just needs to go right. Buck is pod. I need to be there with him. Pod stays together. I thought he knew that. Pod stays together.” He paused before grabbing Peggy’s hands and holding very tightly. “You’ll stay with me too right? Bucky’ll like you.”  
  
Peggy smiled at him. “Of course. Pod stays together.”  
  
∞§∞  
  
The alchemists both promise that it shouldn’t be to bad. Steve could already shift back and forth between bodies. At the same time they both warned him it will hurt.  
  
Steve was sure somewhere in there he screamed, told them not to stop and screamed again.  
  
They hadn't warned him enough. But he had to go after Bucky  
  
Pod stayed together.


	2. Peggy

Peggy screamed nearly beating Howard Stark’s head in before Steve caught her arm. “He did something to it! He did something to my pelt!”

Steve let her arm go.

“Wait!” Howard scrambled back offering up the seal skin. “There was only a little left! This was the only way it’d get to you.”

“Get what?” Steve asked curiously as Peggy stalked forward.

Howard was up on a crate, pelt held forward in a desperate peace offering, before he could speak again. “The serum. What made you big.”

Peggy snatched up her pelt and cradled it away from them. 

“It’s not damaged.” Howard muttered. 

Peggy just glared at him. “If you touch it again I will end you.”

Howard glanced over at Steve who just shrugged. “Don’t touch it.”

∞§∞

Peggy knows that the references to stolen, or lost clothes don’t mean the men are after her pelt. She still bruises a lot of jaws. No one smart would come after a selkie's garment, whether they knew she was a selki or not. 

One such not-so-smart human is spreading out the map in front of them, muttering low enough humans couldn’t hear about the wacky ‘experimentals’. The mussels on Steve’s arms twitch to stand up spines that aren't there in this shape. His shape was however, huge. Humans feared something that towered over them more than the spiny slim things that could have swam next to their boats without them even knowing. 

The human stopped muttering and stepped back so they could look at the map. “We should meet up with the 107th in two days at this rate.” he said. 

Steve gave a pleased humm.

∞§∞

Peggy also bruised a lot of jaws once she learned how lewd they were being according to their human upbringing. 

∞§∞

James, Bucky, Barnes or any combination there of was not among the people moaning on cots. He was not holding a tin of food with shaky hands. He was not crying out for a father or a god as he sobbed. 

He was not there. 

Steve nearly grows his spines out when the humans tell them he’s declared killed in action. The spins start pushing on the inside of his skin when the humans tell them that Bucky could possibly be alive, but there was no hope of a rescue.

Peggy nudged him and nodded at the map behind the humans. “We can get them back.”


	3. Bucky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait, and the shortness life exploded. Here you go More shall fallow soon.

Bucky didn’t even know what he’s muttering anymore. Just that as long as he keep talking the little man in the big glasses won’t make his head hurt worse. There used to be more, but they stopped talking. They stopped talking and screaming and they got cut up into little bits. 

Bucky talked. His whole body felt like it was dry and cracking. That there were swarms of bugs in his veins trying to bite their way out. He couldn’t breath. He talked. Words tripping over themselves and slipping into jumbled sounds on his lips. An alarm erupted and the swarms in his veins spun into a frenzy as his skull split with every wail. He talked. 

Cool hands hold his face directing him to look up at something big and blond as something snaps off the restraints that held him to the table. 

“Bucky, wake up––” “We don’t have time for this.” “––Bucky it’s okay now. I’m taking you home––” “Then pick him up already!”

He feels his body crack and crumble when he’s lifted off the table. But the chest he’s curled into is warm. Someone pressed their hand over his exposed ear to muffle the alarm sounds. Someone warns him they’re about to run, but honestly by the next step, Bucky has stopped talking. He’s ready to die.


	4. Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fic is not dead! And is now included in a simi-nano were I hope to get at least one chapter up a week. Sorry for the delay, its been one hell of a time.

Peggy had the idea to dunk Bucky in the river, and the common sense to realize there was no way Bucky could breath without air. Steve held him in the river, just out of sight of the rescued troops, Bucky’s legs tangling around his tail as the Selkie scouted ahead. Bucky was rubbing his face against Steve’s shoulder when Peggy’s seal shape lept out of the water and landed on human feet upon the shore. “How is he?”  
Steve frowned as Bucky blinked up at him. “Thought you were smaller?” Bucky mumbled, arms tightening around Steve.  
“Bucky?”  
“Head hurts.” Bucky murmured and let his eyes close.  
Steve looked at Peggy. She knew more of human health than he did. “He has a fever. There’s medicines for that back at the camp.” She said softly. Steve frowned but nodded, holding his human as he let the water rock them both. His Pod was back together, it would all be okay.

 

§

 

Steve and Peggy looked at each other. Bucky was tossing and turning, holding his head. The medicines wern’t working. “Should we put him in the water again?” Steve asked quietly. Bucky had slept that night in the river. Now he muttered name and rank in between strings of nonsense.  
Peggy glanced back at the doctors. They weren't watching. “Pick him up, and just look straight ahead.”  
Bucky hardly noticed being lifted. No one stopped to question them as they slipped out the back and down to the lake side near camp. The sergeant nearly sobbed relief when he was lowered into the shallows. Steve petted his human’s hair as Peggy stood guard. Bucky relaxed against Steve, hands slipping out of his hair.  
Steve frowned and pushed his human’s hair aside, giving a tug. It wasn’t, the reeds weren't coming out. Steve hugged Bucky tight and hissed angry at the skull and his gremlin. They had twisted his human into a kelpie.  
Peggy crouched low peering at the sprouting reeds. “We’ll need to watch him when he’s near others in the water.”  
“Bucky wouldn’t––,”  
“He might.” Peggy cut him off. “Think about it. You’ve had a lifetime of being a mer, and can avoid being drawn out by every shiny object and I’ve had a life of being a selkie and can hop back and forth from people's feet to a flippers in a blink. He was just made a kelpie.”  
Steve looked back down at Bucky and then back at Peggy. “What do we do?”  
Peggy let out a long sigh. “He’ll need to stay in the water for at least six hours a day. We’ll need to tell the doctors about it. I’ll talk to the generals so they don’t whisk him away to some lab. You stay with him and look scary so no one else tries to do it for them.”  
Steve nodded. He wasn’t sure when Peggy had become head of their tiny pod, but he wasn’t complaining at all.


	5. Howard § Bucky

Peggy Carter was not to be trifled with, as Howard Stark as learning yet again. “If we could just get some blood samples, or even a few reeds now that they’re fully grown out––”  
“No.”  
“I’ll take you out for fondue?”  
“No.”  
“Is this about the pelt thing because I said I was––Steve!” Howard Stark ducked behind the mer that had been standing unhelpful threw the whole thing as the small freckled woman took a very––very––menacing step towards him. “Come on, when are we ever going to get a kelpie this close again without it trying to kill us all?”  
Steve stepped aside and Howard had to scramble to be out of the direct line of Peggy wrath.  
“Bucky still might try. Humans aren't supposed to become like us.” Steve said softly glancing down at the resting sergeant. He slept better now that he spent half his day near the water. “When he wakes up you can ask him, but no one is experimenting on him again.”  
“Not all experiments are––,”  
“Peggy will be nice compared to me.” Steve warned, spines standing up out of the skin on his arms.  
Howard let out an exasperated sigh and held his hands up. “Alright, alright. No one will touch him. It’s not like we’d do it near water anyway.”  
“When they don’t have water kelpies like to strangle their prey.” Peggy brushed him off.  
Howard Stark quickly left. The pod was fascinating but the health risk was....off putting. 

 

For at least the next few hours. 

 

§§

 

Bucky stared at Steve, waiting patiently under his hands for his pod mate to figure out he couldn’t drown a mer. And with gills on both his neck and along his ribs he couldn’t very easily be strangled either. Bucky just couldn’t get himself to let go.  
Steve’s tail was a heavy weight against his legs as he coiled around them.  
Just waiting at the bottom of the river.  
Waiting for Bucky to let go. To realize what he was doing. To maybe go after a fish instead. To run out of air.  
Bucky should have run out of air by now. He should have needed to breath three minutes ago.  
But he had woken up hungry. So damn hungry and the rations weren't helping. Hands twitching, refusing to look at his reflection when Peggy brought him down to the river. He could listen to her tell him how to fish, but he couldn’t look and see what they’d done to him.  
Steve kissed him and Bucky bit hard.  
He was just so hungry.  
Steve petted down his back, rubbing soothing circles, one hand in his hair still holding Bucky in the kiss/bite. Just waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is team water death squad a go? Is it??

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi! http://otter-with-a-labrys.tumblr.com/


End file.
